Google and Adobe Collaborate to Bring Flash to Android OS

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google today announced during his keynote speech at the MWC [Mobile World Congress] in Barcelona that Google?s Android OS will begin to support Flash 10.1 using hardware acceleration. This means that the Android OS will open itself up to even more content than had even been contemplated before. The OS is no longer locked into app based games or video content. Users can now interact in the same way with webpages that they did on their desktops. And this further shows how Google will continue to gobble up marketshare in the mobile phone OS arena. The big reason is because this development is a huge one is because neither the coveted iPhone nor the upcoming [way in the future] Windows Phone 7 OSes support flash. On top of that, this is not Flash Lite. This is fully fledged Flash, which means that users will get the full functionality of flash and not just in simple audio streams or video streams.

This is a worrying trend for their competitors simply because Microsoft claims that they are working with Adobe to develop a solution, but that solution will not be ready for the launch of Windows Phone 7. This development means that we can expect to see Flash capability on that platform in nearly a year. Needless to say, it is not a feature I would put into consideration when buying a Windows Phone. This lack of Flash is one of the many reasons why we believed the Windows Phone OS to be a DOA OS.

In addition to that, Nokia also announced their new Symbian OS which will be ready around 3Q 2010 which will support full HD video, multiple home screens, and visual multitasking. This will build on the already well designed Symbian OS which is widely used by Nokia in all of their phones.

So, it looks like MWC 2010 has yielded many new and exciting developments in the world of mobile devices and we look forward to seeing phones come out with the new Android OS, Symbian, and Windows Phone 7.

Below is a video of the Symbian OS in action:

Eric Schmidt and Eric Tseng introducing and showing the features of Flash 10.1 on Android:

Also, Adobe.TV ran a video of GPU-accelerated Adobe AIR and Flash 10.1 while running on a tablet powered by nVidia Tegra 2 SoC.